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Mike Allen reports

Even as Obama nears what’s looking a lot like the victory he wanted, White House officials have leaned on semantics to explain how talking to Republicans about what would and wouldn’t be in a deal to end the shutdown and raise the debt ceiling wasn’t, in fact, a negotiation to end the shutdown and raise the debt ceiling.

Meanwhile, both the White House and congressional leaders have tried to explain away why most solutions under discussion are temporary fixes that could bring this all back in a few months — or maybe just a few weeks.

The next few days will be critical in shaping the questions of how much money the government will run on, whether the country will default on its debt and when the next deadlines to revisit these questions will be. But for all the complaints that come from the president and congressional leaders about what a terrible, endless cycle this is, few have faith that anything they agree to will be able to truly change the way the system has come to work.

Obama still has more than three years left in his presidency, and people in the White House feel confident that he has managed to shock a lot of Republicans and Democrats (and reporters) with his commitment to preserving Obamacare and holding the line on major budget basics.

But even though the House GOP has effectively been sidelined from the final stage negotiations for now, there are still many tea partiers in the Republican conference who are stacking up a couple of terrible polls and attacks from moderates against what Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) called both a divine and patriotic calling at the Values Voters summit on Friday.

Ask White House officials whether the president and his aides are ready for another showdown, and the answer is that they think Republicans are less likely to go that route again, given the way this one turned out. But ask Cruz whether he’s comfortable with more shutdown and debt limit standoffs and he says the answer depends on whether Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) start going along with what he and the House GOP want.

“I don’t see this discussion going away. I don’t see how it can go away,” said Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the ranking member of the Sen. Budget Committee.

“This has been a long and difficult time, but we’ve got to continue to raise the issue, and it may well in the future sometime come back on a continuing resolution or a debt ceiling vote,” Sessions said, raising his eyes and shrugging his shoulders in the international sign for “oops.”

That’s the kind of thing reinvigorated Democrats think their opponents still have to say but, after the past two weeks, can’t really mean anymore. Even if the Democrats don’t succeed in getting the longer-term deal they’re pushing for, Obama believes he gave the Republicans something like an early Halloween monkey’s paw: They got their wish, but it came true in a form so grotesque that they’ve learned never to make a wish like that again.

The White House argues it is not negotiating with the people who demanded a “ransom” — “you can use any word you like to describe it,” press secretary Jay Carney said Friday, explaining “we’re listening and we’re talking” — and they clearly relish the fact that House Republicans appear to have put their own party into an increasingly difficult spot for statewide and national elections.

“The continued threat of default as a point of leverage in a budget negotiation … is putting the American economy at risk in an effort to achieve some partisan advantage — which we can’t do,” Carney added.

But the reality is that, despite having only a slim majority in one chamber of Congress, Republicans have once again successfully forced the president to choose between risking a global meltdown and eating chunks of their agenda, and done it while the world warned about a market revolt that has not quite materialized. They did not, despite White House demands, have to start by reopening government and increasing the debt ceiling — that’ll be part of the deal Obama agrees to.